Film Review: ‘The Fault in Our Stars’

Almost half a century ago, “Love Story,” a weeper that was destined to become a national obsession, began with the deathless words “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?” Now “The Fault in Our Stars” seeks to become its successor with a new story of doomed romance. What can you say about a movie that brings two beautiful teens together in a cancer support group? That its stars do what they’re asked to do, in one case faultlessly; that its ambitions are equaled by its contrivances; and that those contrivances, however shameless, are partly offset by the beauty of Shailene Woodley’s portrayal of the heroine and narrator, Hazel Grace Lancaster, whose love of life is as palpable as the disease that threatens to kill her.

Hazel has a fondness for straight talk. She’s depressed, she tells us in a preface, but not because depression is, in the conventional wisdom, a side effect of cancer. “It’s a side effect of dying,” she says, “which is what’s happening to me.” Living with cancer-ravaged lungs, she is tethered to an oxygen bottle wherever she goes and wears a nasal cannula, a little two-pronged piece of plastic that delivers the oxygen to her nostrils. (In a fleetingly affecting detail, Hazel, checking herself out in a mirror before her first visit to the support group, adjusts the cannula like a fashion accessory.)

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The boy who becomes the love of her life, Augustus Waters, has a penchant for expansive talk. Cancer-free after losing one leg, Gus is insistently, sometimes insufferably, verbal, and, as played by Ansel Elgort, almost preposterously handsome. Looking like an Adonis is hardly Mr. Elgort’s fault, but neither is the hero’s windiness. In John Green’s phenomenally successful young-adult novel, Gus is partial to big words and fancy locutions, but they’re a cover, in a nuanced character, for the existential terror that his cancer will come back. In the movie, the arc of Gus’s character is drawn with a brush so broad that it smudges. He eventually reveals his vulnerability, and movingly so, but before that Mr. Elgort is encouraged, or indulged, in posturings that make the hero an annoying presence and a baffling one, a visitant from some weird preppie culture .

Nuance isn’t part of the production’s program. The director, Josh Boone, goes for maximum emotional impact most of the time, and usually gets what he’s after. (The music, by Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, should come under the campaign to outlaw large, sugary drinks.) There’s no question that the movie will be a huge hit, both because of and in spite of its manipulations, the most flagrant of which—taken directly from the book, it should be said—uses Anne Frank’s life to heighten our feelings about Hazel.

Still, moments of grace punctuate the film, which was adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. (They wrote last year’s “The Spectacular Now,” a romantic comedy, with much more of a spontaneous, independent spirit, in which Ms. Woodley gave another endearing performance opposite Miles Teller.) Laura Dern, as Hazel’s mother, spends most of her screen time exuding brittle jauntiness, but her defenses crumble in a mother-daughter confrontation about what happens if, or when, Hazel dies. Hazel rises fiercely to another confrontation with a novelist, played lugubriously by Willem Dafoe, who proves to be anything but the wise man she’d been seeking.

“The Fault in Our Stars” is Hazel’s story, and it is Ms. Woodley’s movie at almost every moment she’s on camera. She has the precious gift of simplicity, whether she’s observing the people around her with a cool eye or filling the screen with a warmth that seems to come naturally. Others in the cast work at being winning; she wins by seeming to be herself. That’s putting her achievement too simply, of course. What leavens the heaviness of the theme is the heroine’s wry wit, which Ms. Woodley deploys just as naturally. And when the time comes for suffering, the pain of watching her is mingled with the pleasure of a performance that transcends contrivance. This young actress is the real, heart-piercing thing.

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